Dreaming about Divine by Bonnelle Lewis Strickling

Author:Bonnelle Lewis Strickling [Strickling, Bonnelle Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780791480175
Google: 6_CW5V4E8CsC
Amazon: 079147092X
Barnesnoble: 079147092X
Goodreads: 1025444
Published: 2007-11-19T18:03:36+00:00

Limitation

I’m facing a Christ figure who’s in a long white robe. He has his arms outstretched, palms forward. At his left side is a young girl, about seven or eight, who is stretching up her right hand to touch his left hand. They cannot touch. She is weeping and is in need of comforting. He is weeping also with the knowledge of the impossibility of his being able to truly comfort her. I begin to feel my way into him and how it feels to see, to experience, others’ pain and sorrow and be unable to remedy it. He would like to be able to reach down and touch her hand, but he knows that he cannot—cannot provide the comfort and assurance that she needs. The gap remains. The feeling in the dream is of need, yearning, compassion, sorrow, impotence, and some resignation. On waking, there is a sense of “Yes, that’s the way it is.”

The image has stayed with me as a kind of representation of Jesus that I can accept as consistent with my own experience of how it must feel to look out onto the pain in the world that cannot be assuaged. How it must feel to know and yet be unable to touch, to comfort, to heal everything. So the image is of compassion, sorrow, willing-but-unable to remedy, yearning (on both sides) but unable to contact, yet refusing to turn away from the knowledge of suffering.

Jake felt that this dream had influenced him deeply. It is an image of living out the divine through entering into the sorrows of others. This is a realistic representation of one important aspect of being a therapist. Being a therapist entails being willing to enter into the sorrows of others, and doing so makes us realize how much sorrow there is the world. Our clients suffer, and they also come from families in which there is a great deal of suffering.

Being a therapist attunes one to the suffering in the world, to the knowledge that for many, life is filled with pain and disappointment and loss. And even when we are able to offer our help, those who come to us sometimes cannot truly absorb it. In these cases, all we have to offer is our conscious, attentive presence, which means that we must enter into their suffering.

This is a dream of the dark side of the development of the ego-Self axis.

It is also a dream of willingness to suffer, itself a spiritual transformation of the will. M. Scott Peck argues that a great deal of neurotic difficulty is caused by an unwillingness to suffer:

Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain. We

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Dreaming about the Divine

attempt to skirt around problems rather than meeting them head on.

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